Composer of Contradictions

Michael Nyman is on the phone from his hometown, London, talking about being well known and little known, all at the same time.

Nyman is famous for his music for films--especially his best-selling score for Jane Campion’s “The Piano,” and for scores to the infamous films of Peter Greenaway, such as “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.”

But he is also a composer in the “legitimate” music world. He has written for dance companies, for the opera stage, for orchestras and smaller ensembles.

“It’s all interrelated,” he says. It’s just news to some people.

Which means it’s fitting that Nyman will make his Los Angeles debut this week with not one but three very different events. At the core of his visit is a performance Friday at UCLA with the Michael Nyman Band--he’ll be leading it from the piano--in a survey of his film music. Wednesday and Thursday, the band will perform with the Stephen Petronio Company in the full-evening dance piece “Strange Attractors”--Nyman provided the music for one of the work’s three parts.

And on Tuesday night, Nyman turns his attentions to the art world. A quartet drawn from his band and soprano Sarah Leonard will perform his score for artist Mary Kelly’s new installation at the Santa Monica Art Museum, “The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi.”

Why the delayed debut in the town he visits often enough--to talk to agents and see friends--that he calls it “my second home”?

Nyman explained that “there was talk, three or four years ago, about doing a big film concert at the Hollywood Bowl, but there was a change of regime and it never happened. There was also talk of doing something with the L.A. [Philharmonic] and that didn’t happen. So I seem to be caught between artistic regimes.”

Of Friday’s main attraction, he says, “I think it [will] be good to present film music in the film capital of the world, to a suspecting and an unsuspecting audience.”

And the other projects? “‘The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi’ started as something I thought would be quite simple,” Nyman said, but the complexity of the text has dictated otherwise. And the work for Petronio’s famously physical dancers? “I think [people will] find the Petronio piece, the material itself, very different.”

What listeners can expect is music that ranges between seemingly contradictory extremes, from sweeping neo-romantic sounds (the orchestrated soundtracks for “Gattaca” and “The End of the Affair”) to Nyman’s brand of Minimalism, in which overlapping lines and rhythms create a kinetic texture. Reviewers found his 1999 score for the film “Wonderland” “transcendent” and “glorious”; it “plucks at the heartstrings.” A concert hall multimedia work, “The Commissar Vanishes,” on the other hand, “hit like an express train.”

Nyman doesn’t acknowledge a gulf. “I’m not one of those composers who separates himself out in terms of manner or style or approach or language,” he says. “I don’t put on a different kind of musical suit or shirt when I become a film composer. Obviously, the demands are different, but the compositional process is more or less the same.”

The L.A. event that Nyman seems most jazzed about is also his newest composition. On the day of the interview, the ink was still drying on his piece for Mary Kelly’s installation.

Kelly, a Conceptual artist who teaches at UCLA, knows Nyman from her days in London, where her circle of friends also included Greenaway. This installation represents the first time she has incorporated music in her work.

The artwork is made up of a series of gray felt-like panels embossed with the text of “The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi,” which Kelly wrote based on reports of an Albanian boy who was left for dead during the latest Balkans war, rescued by the Serbs and later reunited with his parents. Her medium is clothes-dryer lint--she fixes plastic letters onto the filter of a regular, everyday dryer to get the embossed effect.

Her text will be performed once live to Nyman’s music in the gallery, and then a recording of the performance will be installed in a separate gallery. “It’s not a fixed-piece performance. It’s not music theater,” Kelly says. “It’s a score for an exhibition. That’s the best way I can describe it.”

Musically, Nyman said, “there are materials [in it] that are common to all four verses, a kind of refrain that is more or less the same, that separates the verses. But I think there is more dissimilar between the verses than similar. I found myself stopping after every line and making individual meaning and musical parallels [for] each line.

“That’s brought out the best in me, not just the mechanistic sort of ‘Michael Nyman writes a ballad’ kind of thing. I sent Mary a fax saying this ballad has become a kind of anti-ballad.”

Kelly likes the notion of reconfigured balladry. “The way I wrote it doesn’t follow a literary form,” she said. “I did give him some compositional notes, but I’m sure he ignored them,” she added, laughing.

The back story for Petronio’s “Strange Attractors” goes in another direction. Nyman’s music has often been used in, and commissioned for, dance settings. He has worked with choreographers Lucinda Childs and Siobhan Davies, among others. His 1999 CD “And Do They Do/Zoo Caprices,” kicks off with a piece from a work for Davies and the London Contemporary Dance Theatre.

Petronio initially thought Nyman was overexposed as a dance composer. Eventually, however, he decided he wanted to collaborate with the composer, and out of it came one part of “Strange Attractors.”

The work--named for the concept in chaos theory of “a moving and magnetic focal point in a seemingly chaotic field,” according to Petronio’s program notes--has a Prelude set to music by the rock group Placebo. Nyman’s section is called Part 1; it’s followed by Part 2, danced to techno music by James Lavelle and Richard File. Reviewers have generally liked the entire work, but most of them have focused especially on the Nyman section--and almost every one of them employs the word “lush” to describe movement and sound.

According to Petronio, though, Nyman’s pulsing Minimalism and his neo-romantic side can be found in the Part 1 score.

“I wanted Michael’s music because of the romantic sweep of it,” Petronio says. “Michael was drawn to my work for its speed, so I think he assumed that’s what I wanted when we first began talking. [Part 1] is a 25-minute section, so it slides back and forth between the two.”

As does the film music that will be the focus on Friday. The program is based on a new compilation CD, “The Very Best of Michael Nyman: Film Music 1980-2001,” but it’s also a chance to showcase the composer’s string and brass ensemble. Its first incarnation was in 1976, when composer Harrison Birtwistle commissioned Nyman to arrange some 18th century Venetian songs, and originally it combined period instruments with modern instruments.

“It was called a band,” Nyman said, “because it was rough and ready, loud, slightly vulgar. And since we play amplified, there is an obvious connotation of a rock band.”

The group is now all-modern instruments, and “more refined,” he says, but Nyman still likes the term “band.” “Duke Ellington called his band an orchestra. My title is sort of dumbing down a bit and his description was dumbing up, so to speak. He was trying to get a little more status, I’m going the other way.”

Nyman is clearly happy about maintaining his own playing unit. “[It’s] worth its weight in gold,” he says, “not having to, every time you work with another musician, teach them how to strike a note or how to articulate on a saxophone. They know my language, and they’ve also helped me create it.”

Nyman’s trajectory as a composer is more picaresque than most. Born in 1944, he started out as a pianist turned musicologist and critic (some sources credit him with being first to use the term “Minimalist” in describing music in print). In 1974, he wrote an influential new music book, “Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond.”

Nyman’s composer identity was awakened only in his 30s, with the Birtwistle commission and his relationship with filmmaker Greenaway.

They have collaborated on nine films since the late 1970s; their last was “Prospero’s Books” in 1991. In between came “The Draughts- man’s Contract” (1982) and “The Cook, the Thief” (1989), films that earned Greenaway a reputation for shocking imagery and decadent themes, and Nyman a reputation for elegant counterbalancing scores.

“I’ve been lucky in the sense that when I started writing for Peter Greenaway in ‘77, I was just starting out as a composer,” Nyman says. And working on Greenaway’s films meant that his work evolved in an unrestrained environment. “Greenaway’s films had nothing to do with Hollywood or sensible narrative and storytelling techniques,” he says. “I didn’t need to be any composer other than the one I wanted to be. I felt at home as a composer [working on those films].”

Not that the Greenaway connection isn’t a mixed blessing. “There are lots of things in his films that made me feel distinctly queasy,” Nyman says. “I’m not obsessed with violence. I’m not obsessed with the kind of sexual hang-ups that he is.”

Which has made Nyman’s entry into more mainstream films more challenging. “Being cast as a Greenaway acolyte,” he says, makes others think “‘here is a composer we could in no way employ.’ Also, my work doesn’t necessarily fall into the acceptable language and grammar of Hollywood.”

“The Piano,” his bestseller score for a very different kind of art film, also carried with it good and bad effects. It’s breezy modal noodling, which verges on new age, and isn’t really typical of his compositional style. It’s simplified, he says.

That score, Nyman says, “has given me a kind of renown that I’m very grateful for. But if I want to do an opera or a string quartet, they might say, ‘Oh, Michael Nyman did “The Piano” and is not capable or not worthy or too lightweight,’ et cetera.”

“In terms of the [high] cultural scene, it might be whatever the opposite of bonus is. But in terms of getting into people’s heads and hearts and lives, it’s been quite miraculous.”

When it comes to his concert work, then, its not surprising to find him on the experimental edge of that scene. Last year, his opera “Facing Goya” tackled the subject of eugenics and genetic manipulation by following the skull of the painter Goya through a fictional history and into the realm of cloning and biotechnology. Another recent multimedia work, “The Commissar Vanishes,” was based on David King’s book about the manipulation of photographs and documents in Stalinist Russia. It combined a Minimalist score for the Nyman Band with two screens of videos. Images, ideas and sound made for Minimalism “at its best,” said one reviewer. Among Nyman’s list of other pieces are a group of straightforward string quartets (mostly written for the Arditti Quartet) mixed with such pieces as “Yamamoto Perpetuo,” written to accompany a fashion show, and “MGV,” commemorating the opening of a high-speed train.

For Nyman, such eclecticism is the way to go; he just wishes more people would follow.

“I can’t complain, on the one hand,” he says. “I’m proud to be Michael Nyman, individualist composer. On the other hand, I can complain when people don’t accept my individuality. It’s a strange situation.”

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“The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi,” Tuesday, 7 p.m., Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2525 Michigan Ave., G-1, Santa Monica. (310) 586-6488.

“Strange Attractors,” Stephen Petronio Company, Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m., $14 to $40; “The Film Scores,” Friday, 8 p.m., $12 to $35, Royce Hall, UCLA. (310) 825-2101.

Josef Woodard is a frequent contributor to Calendar.